MLA 2020: Literatures of Ethnic Minorities in Southwestern China

There were many ethnic minorities in southern China including Miao, Yao, Zhuang, Dong, Dai, Muslims, and even Hakka. How did these minority groups compose literature in imperial China? How did these literatures imagine the world, imagine their ancestors, communities, Han Chinese, and feature connections to the world? In what circumstances were these literatures written or performed? This panel seeks to provide a fresh approach to the emerging field of Sinophone studies and ethnic minority literature studies in premodern and modern China.

Duncan Poupard is Assistant Professor of Translation at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the translation of Chinese minority texts, specifically those of the Naxi people, and looks at themes of cultural representation in translation and the issues involved in translating semi-oral, non-linear writing. His research has been published in journals such as Asian Ethnicityand the Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese. He will present a paper titled “The cultural transfer of the Tibetan Bon tradition into southwest China.”The period of translation that saw the birth of the Tibetan canon was one of the world’s great cultural exchanges, but the 8^thto 9^thcenturies saw a cultural exchange that is much lesser known, but perhaps comparable in significance. This was the transfer of the Bon canon, via the process of cultural translation, leading to the eventual formation of the literature of the Naxi people of southwest China: a literature which flourished during the Ming and Qing dynasties.During the late 8th century, a time of persecution of Bon believers in Tibet, Bon practitioners migrated to Tibetan border areas, and there made contact with the Naxi, whose ancestors, the ancient Qiang, had migrated south and settled within the Yangtze loop in the region north of Lijiang in the first century. The ex-Bon monks were instrumental in the formulation of Naxi ritual practices, and much of the early Bon traditions are preserved, in adapted form, in the Naxi ritual manuscripts, written in the logographic Naxi script. He argues thatunderstanding these manuscripts as composite pieces of semi-oral ritual literature will reveal how extensively Naxi myths have been inherited from Bon traditions, and show the cultural importance of this “minor” literature on China’s periphery.

Katie Dimmery is a doctoral candidate pursuing dual PhD in Anthropology and Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Her research focuses on topics of textuality and intimacy in the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. She will present a paper titled “Problems of speaking for others: On the Chinese translation of Naxi literature and the Naxi exegesis of Chinese translation” at the panel. Popularized recently through tourism and media, “pictographic” ceremonial texts of southwest China’s Naxi ethnic minority first reached wider attention in the late 19^thand early 20^thcenturies, when Han Chinese and international researchers began to collect and translate these texts. This paper considers how the work of collection and translation was pursued, through long-term relationships between Chinese-language researchers and Naxi ritualists, and how the work resulted in significant stylistic and formal changes in Naxi textual practice. Drawing on interviews with researchers and ritualists involved in translation, as well as my own study of the texts through apprenticeship to several ritualists, I trace the gradual erasure of one modality or “register” of Naxi script usage—an erasure with powerful effects for the types of collective and singular voicing the texts produce. Ultimately, this erasure has led to a “modernization” of Naxi textual practice, with ideological and material similarities to May Fourth-era Chinese textual reform.

Yuanfei Wang is Assistant Professor of comparative literature at University of Georgia. Her research focuses on Sinophone literature in early modern period. Her research has been published in journals such as positions: asia critique, and her first book on Chinese narratives of emigrants and pirates in East Asia and Southeast Asia is forthcoming. She will present a paper titled “Rhyme and Lyrics in the Ballads of Hakka People” at the panel. Hakka people are a unique minority community among Han Chinese people. Hakka people are migrants who strive to settle down at new places and adapt themselves to local environment and society, while at the same time preserve their own language, culture, and customs in the new environment. Thus, they are called “guests” by local people. This paper attempts to study the mountain songs of Hakka People, especially the ballad genre called wujuban五句板. The paper will pay specific attention to the rhymes and rhetoric in the Hakka ballads sung in Hakka language. Further, the paper will study the relationship between rhyming and the lyrics of the Hakka ballads that delineate family harmony and conflicts, conjugal relationship, and the suffering and bitterness of life. This study of Hakka ballads is based upon her fieldwork in Guangxi province of China.

Our discussant will be Professor Mark Bender at Ohio State University. He is the expert on Chinese ethnic minorities’ literatures. He has authored and edited Butterfly Mother: Miao (Hmong) Creation Epics from Guizhou Province, China, The Columbia Anthology of Chinese Folk and Popular Literature, and The Borderlands of Asia: Culture, Place, Poetry.